POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

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What visual layout for Campaign Macros do you prefer?

Poll ended at Tue Sep 13, 2011 9:38 am

A) Current compact clumping
0
No votes
B) Large even sized that are easier to see and scan but take up much more space
5
100%
C) Other...
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 5

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lmarkus001
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POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by lmarkus001 »

Some discussion has come up around what the campaign buttons should look like. I have been of the camp that says these buttons should take the smallest amount of screen real estate as possible. There is another camp that is in favor of orderly layout (which is easier to visually scan but consumes significantly more screen space). Here is your chance to voice an opinion (and be ignored like anything else in life :-) ).
A) Fits Wherever Layout
Image
B) Vertical/Normalized Layout
Image
Traditional - Option A
Traditional - Option A
TraditionalButtons.png (34.46 KiB) Viewed 7257 times
Normalized - Option B
Normalized - Option B
EvenButtons.png (33.29 KiB) Viewed 7257 times
Attachments
A) Horizontal Layout
A) Horizontal Layout
TraditionalButtonsHorizontal.png (30.88 KiB) Viewed 7250 times
Last edited by lmarkus001 on Thu Sep 08, 2011 10:27 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by lmarkus001 »

A) Fits Wherever Layout
Image
B) Vertical/Normalized Layout
Image

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by lmarkus001 »

C) Ah I might have an answer to this issue. I could leave the macros in the small minimal category format by default, but have a Setup macro that changes the size and category of all the Campaign macros as an non-reversible action. That would support both camps for a campaign file, but would not support individual preferences.

Hummm... so maybe a single button in the Campaign Macros that opens a Frame that has the layout of your choice? This is less good as I know for my running campaigns I usually delete several of the Campaign Macros that are either not relevant to the system or are more initial setup (once and done).

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by Azhrei »

lmarkus001 wrote:have a Setup macro that changes the size and category of all the Campaign macros as an non-reversible action.
Just curious: why would it be non-reversible?

If all buttons floated to their own size preferences then a macro could edit the macro properties and make them fixed-width. And if they were fixed-width, the width could be set back to floating (null string? zero? I don't know what the value is that denotes "floating width").

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by aliasmask »

It's possible to save all the macro info on a lib token and then swap out the buttons. With a slight modification to RPEdit I could probably have it access the campaign macros, download all current info, and swap out macros based on preferences. I don't have a mass delete option, but that wouldn't be hard to program.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by lmarkus001 »

Results so far:

10,000,000* votes for "smallest buttons possible"
6 votes for normalized buttons

* My wife cast her vote here...

I am actually going to normalize my buttons (but a bit thinner, 80 vs. 94, than what Aliasmask did) but try to have all regularly used buttons in the main or GM categories. The reason is that the extra categories Aliasmask proposes forces the Campaign macros to be in a vertical layout.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by wolph42 »

lmarkus001 wrote:Results so far:

10,000,000* votes for "smallest buttons possible"
6 votes for normalized buttons

* My wife cast her vote here...

I am actually going to normalize my buttons (but a bit thinner, 80 vs. 94, than what Aliasmask did) but try to have all regularly used buttons in the main or GM categories. The reason is that the extra categories Aliasmask proposes forces the Campaign macros to be in a vertical layout.
you can also consider building your own macro panel, like I did, this gives you acces to 'tabs' where you can put macros that are e.g. not used very often, like setting up a token. I've been doing this more and more, also for my bag of trick drop-in, so a user has ONE button instead 15 on his campaign panel. Here's an example:
Image

Added advantage is that you can make the macro buttons 'propertytype dependend'. What you see here are the macro for a character. Click on a vehile and the panel changes to reflect those macros, similar for 'grenades', 'nothing selected', or 'not supported'

I know you can put macros on the token itself to get the same effect (I even deviced the auto-populate token with macros on select method), but this is way easier and less demanding of the system (as I noticed in the early days that moving many tokens >10 with many macros >40 would slow down the movement considerably)... and you have tabs.

...did I mention its has tabs ?! :mrgreen: (yeah I know MT supports tabs too, but this is different 8) )

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by aliasmask »

Very nifty. I like it. Only problem with that format is that it's set in stone and doesn't conform to window size (unless you know a trick I don't - if you want the button borders). I've been working on a tabs plugin. Here's what I have so far:
Image1.jpg
Image1.jpg (26.12 KiB) Viewed 7216 times
Only problem I'm having is in order to insure no data corruption, I'm finding the need to have player dedicated lib tokens more and more lately, so I'm working on that system now. Basically, the GM will create the player lib token with a macro. These will hold player specific data and will only be updated by that player. The GM when doing mods to player data will send the data to player to run on his client. This will be accomplished via broadcast, execLink with an autoexecute macro. This was considered because of something that Craig recently pointed out about updating tokens by multiple people at the same time. So, in my code I'll have something like this:

Code: Select all

[H: am.spp(playerName,"propName1","propVal1",...)]
To avoid multiple blank lines during update, setPlayerProperty (spp) will handle multiple properties and will usually have one update per macro. getPlayerProperty (gpp) won't use the same method of execLink, so no blank lines with that.

How this is related to the tabs code is that I'm going to cache the content on the player lib. The content can be static html or code that performs other actions. There will be minimal coding and setup and it'll be fast. This is also one step closer to my avatar idea.

Took me awhile to get the html just right to have floating buttons above the content window. If your interested in the format I used, here it is:
||| HTML |||

Code: Select all

[H: gradient = strformat("background-image:url(%s);",getImage("image:gradient"))]
[H: paperBG = strformat("background-image:url(%s);",getImage("image:paper"))]
[H: tabCSS = strformat("%s_css@%s",getMacroName(),getMacroLocation())]
[H: link.html = strformat("macro://viewTab/none/%s?",currentToken())]

<table style="width:100%" class="tabTable">
   <tr valign="top">
      <td>
         <table style="border-spacing:1px" class="tabTable">
            <tr>
               <td class="tabButtonActive" style="[r: gradient]" NOWRAP><span title="tip"> Text Here </span></td>
               <td class="tabButton" style="[r: gradient]" NOWRAP><span title="tip"> [r: macroLink("Text Here","viewTab@"+getMacroLocation(),"none","",currentToken())] </span></td>
               <td class="tabButton" style="[r: gradient]" NOWRAP><span title="tip"> Text Here </span></td>
               <td class="tabButton" style="[r: gradient]" NOWRAP><span title="tip"> Text Here </span></td>
               <td class="tabButton" style="[r: gradient]" NOWRAP><span title="tip"> Text Here </span></td>
            </tr>
         </table>
         <table  class="tabTable" style="background-color:#ffff80;[r: paperBG]">
            <tr class="tabButtonContent">
               <td style="margin:5pt">This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. This is the body of the text. </td>
            </tr>
         </table>
      </td>
   </tr>
</table> 
||| CSS |||

Code: Select all

.tabTable {
   background-color:white;
   border-spacing:0px;
   border-style:solid;
   border-width:0pt;
}
.tabButtonActive {
   background-color:#ffff80;
   border-width:1pt;
   border-color:black;
   border-style:solid;
   font-weight:700;
   font-family:Tahoma;
   font-size:8pt;
   text-align:center;
}
.tabButtonActive a {
   text-decoration:none;
   color:black;
}
.tabButton {
   background-color:white;
   border-width:1pt;
   border-color:black;
   border-style:solid;
   font-weight:700;
   font-family:Tahoma;
   font-size:8pt;
   text-align:center;
}
.tabButton a {
   text-decoration:none;
   color:black;
}
.tabButtonDisabled {
   background-color:white;
   border-width:1pt;
   border-color:black;
   border-style:solid;
   font-weight:700;
   font-family:Tahoma;
   font-size:8pt;
   color:#C0C0C0;
   text-align:center;
}
.tabButtonContent {
   border-width:1pt;
   border-color:black;
   border-style:solid;
}
The way I did the thin borders before threw me off. Nested tables really adds to the white space between them which didn't look right.

edit: As to the OP, doing this method for macro execution has the same problem as my format in relation to being stuck with a specific frame format. It's possible to code around that though, but... this is probably too much work for the payoff at this point in development.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by wolph42 »

Unless i misundestand you, but the frame is certainly not set in stone. Granted the buttons don't 'reshuffle' to less lines when you make the frame bigger but you certainly can enlarge or shrink this frame to you liking. If you shrink the width then the
Text
Will
Get
Compressed
Like
This.

Or do you mean something else.?

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by aliasmask »

wolph42 wrote:Unless i misundestand you, but the frame is certainly not set in stone. Granted the buttons don't 'reshuffle' to less lines when you make the frame bigger but you certainly can enlarge or shrink this frame to you liking. If you shrink the width then the
Text
Will
Get
Compressed
Like
This.

Or do you mean something else.?
That's what I mean. If you look at Lindsay's screen shot, he has a more wide and squat view of the macro buttons. There would be a bunch of empty space with this format. He'd have to change the tables around to fill it up.

edit: Ooh, what do you think about a toolbar. It could replace the camp macros without eliminating them.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by lmarkus001 »

Yeah I think long term a toolbar might be nice. It would be really nice if players could sort and organize the buttons as they desired in their individual toolbars.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by Raoden »

aliasmask wrote:Only problem I'm having is in order to insure no data corruption, I'm finding the need to have player dedicated lib tokens more and more lately, so I'm working on that system now. Basically, the GM will create the player lib token with a macro. These will hold player specific data and will only be updated by that player. The GM when doing mods to player data will send the data to player to run on his client. This will be accomplished via broadcast, execLink with an autoexecute macro.
Once upon a time, long ago, I started working on something like this. Only, instead of making a separate Lib token for each player, I just used a single Lib token that stored all player-specific settings as Properties, with the player's name tacked onto the Property name as a prefix.

So if a player with a screen name SirBob wanted to set his default font size to larger than normal, for example, I would use a line like

Code: Select all

[h: setLibProperty( "Lib:InfoDump", strformat( "%{s}.defaultFontSize", getPlayerName()), 14 )]
and end up with a property named "SirBob.defaultFontSize" on my player data token.

(Apologies if the code above doesn't actually parse correctly; I'm a little rusty after a year of grad school.)

Anyway ... I'm telling you all of this because now I'm concerned that my method may have "data corruption" issues. Is there anything wrong with this method, or should it work just as well as the multiple-Lib-Tokens method? (Assuming two different players don't ever join the same campaign with the same screen name. Obviously that could be problematic.)
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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by aliasmask »

Your problem is if you have 2 or more people connected writing to the same token at the same time. Each client has their own version of the lib token locally and when they update it, it is sent to all the other clients. Unfortunately, it updates the whole token, not just the changes. So, it is very likely people will be overwriting each others data all the time if everyone shares the same token at the same time.

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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by Raoden »

Ah, OK. That makes sense, thanks.
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Re: POLL - Campaign Macro Button Look

Post by mfrizzell »

wolph42 wrote:
lmarkus001 wrote:Results so far:

10,000,000* votes for "smallest buttons possible"
6 votes for normalized buttons

* My wife cast her vote here...

I am actually going to normalize my buttons (but a bit thinner, 80 vs. 94, than what Aliasmask did) but try to have all regularly used buttons in the main or GM categories. The reason is that the extra categories Aliasmask proposes forces the Campaign macros to be in a vertical layout.
you can also consider building your own macro panel, like I did, this gives you acces to 'tabs' where you can put macros that are e.g. not used very often, like setting up a token. I've been doing this more and more, also for my bag of trick drop-in, so a user has ONE button instead 15 on his campaign panel. Here's an example:
Image

Added advantage is that you can make the macro buttons 'propertytype dependend'. What you see here are the macro for a character. Click on a vehile and the panel changes to reflect those macros, similar for 'grenades', 'nothing selected', or 'not supported'

I know you can put macros on the token itself to get the same effect (I even deviced the auto-populate token with macros on select method), but this is way easier and less demanding of the system (as I noticed in the early days that moving many tokens >10 with many macros >40 would slow down the movement considerably)... and you have tabs.

...did I mention its has tabs ?! :mrgreen: (yeah I know MT supports tabs too, but this is different 8) )
Wolph do you have this somewhere as a drop in or part of a framework?
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